My thoughts on Bosnia as registered in a letter to the Independent have been picked up in Bosnia by the Dnevni Avaz newspaper (Bosniac/Muslim), prompting the expected surge of abusive comments from readers. But lawks, what a photo from pre-grey hair days.
It is always heartening to see Croat DNA on the cricket field. Especially when everything else is going so badly.
Here is a striking story of a young Bosnian (Bosniac/Muslim) woman who fled Sarajevo during the war there and ended up in London. Where she now is doing rather well. As is Arminka Helic, another young Bosniac who is a foreign policy adviser to William Hague and so gets in […]
I am tasked to prepare some ideas on the problems which may arise between civilian and military ‘cultures’ in trying to help fragile or failed states. See the Center for Global Development on the subject. The basic problem is that things are what they are. Fragile states are fragile, because […]
A reader asks: I’m dimly aware of some of the covert aid the US offered to Milosevic’s opposition prior to his downfall. I am wondering if you can share some details about those events as well as whether your government also provided similar aid. This would be a very long […]
There is a lot on this site about the problems we and the people of the former Yugoslav region face in where precisely the borders of new states should be, and how those new states should be defined. Try this. Or this. Former US Ambassador to Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia/Montenegro […]
Back in 1998 at Harvard I wrote a paper on the Bosnian situation and the ‘deep’ contradictions of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Here is one passage from it: … any attempt to negotiate a democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina solely with Presidents Tudjman and Milosevic and Bosnian leaders (Bosniac, Serb and […]
Last night I was back again at the Frontline Club to hear Allan Little talk to Nick Hawton about the latter’s new book The Quest for Radovan Karadzic: When everybody else seemed to have given the hunt, one journalist doggedly followed his trail, travelling from the snow-capped mountains of Montenegro […]
The claim by the defence of Radovan Karadzic that he had a deal with Richard Holbrooke ("This is it – leave public and political life in Republika Srpska and you won’t have to go to the Hague." "OK…") is back in the news again. Back in mid-1996, only a few months […]
Here is a wannabe high-browish piece about Grand Theft Auto, a cleverly violent computer car-based game appealing to most boys of all ages. The hero of the game is one Niko Bellic, a computerised Balkanite tough egg (Serb?). I suspect that no Serb/Balkan name has a double ll in it […]
